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Treasury Is Faulted For Papers' Release

The Treasury Department's inspector general reported Monday that Treasury officials should not have released 140 of 19,000 documents that former Secretary Paul H. O'Neill requested and was given after his dismissal in December 2002. Mr. O'Neill, however, did nothing wrong, the investigation concluded.

Material culled from all the documents, including the 140 that the report found should have been classified, became the backbone of a book, ''The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill'' (Simon & Schuster).

The book, written by Ron Suskind in cooperation with Mr. O'Neill and published in January, tracks the latter's two bumpy years as Treasury secretary before his dismissal, part of a shake-up of Mr. Bush's economic team. It is highly critical of the president, describing him as disengaged on some issues but riveted by at least one: ending Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq.

The report by the inspector general, Jeffrey Rush Jr., said that mislabeling had caused the release of the ''national security or sensitive but unclassified'' material but that neither Mr. O'Neill nor anyone in the department had broken any laws.

''Had these 140 documents been properly marked as classified,'' the report said, ''the documents would not have been entered into Treasury's unclassified computer system and O'Neill would not have received them.''

Mr. O'Neill's successor, John W. Snow, told Congress last month that procedures were being changed to prevent similar disclosures.